“We think the effect is pretty minimal in the in close proximity to upcoming,” Dou Shen, executive vice president and head of Baidu AI Cloud, mentioned of the U.S. chip export controls.
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Chinese tech company Baidu expects that impression from U.S. chip sanctions on its enterprises will be “confined,” a business govt said on Tuesday for the duration of a Q&A session of its third quarter earnings call.
In October, the United States imposed export controls limiting American businesses from marketing semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to Chinese chip manufacturers.
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“We consider the impression is fairly confined in the in close proximity to long term,” explained Dou Shen, executive vice president and head of AI Cloud team, in reaction to an viewers member’s problem about how the curbs will have an affect on Baidu’s skill to grow its synthetic intelligence cloud computing arm and autonomous driving organizations, which rely on superior AI chips.
“A massive portion of our AI Cloud organization and even broader AI company does not count way too a great deal on the very state-of-the-art chips,” stated Shen.
Baidu also operates a robotaxi organization, Apollo Go, which has secured permits in Beijing, Wuhan and Chongqing’s Yongchuan District to run a entirely driverless professional robotaxi company in all those areas.
“And for the element of our organizations that require highly developed chips, we have now stocked plenty of in hand to guidance our small business in the in close proximity to time period,” he said.
Shen additional that Baidu develops its own AI chip, named Kunlun. He stated Baidu has presently started off to use Kunlun chip to guidance some huge-scale AI-computing tasks internally and to serve external shoppers.
“Because we have comprehensive stack of AI capabilities from chips to frameworks to basis products and to software computer software, we can accomplish much better effectiveness as we enhance the AI tasks from finish to end,” Shen claimed.
He added that automotive chips are not on the prohibited listing. “So, this suggests that in the around upcoming, in-car computing is not influenced,” he stated.
An analyst instructed CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Wednesday that Baidu is “totally” a top rated choose, citing chip resilience as 1 of the good reasons.
“They are diversifying the producing into their personal facility and beginning to use their individual chips, Kunlun, for state-of-the-art apps,” mentioned James Lee, a U.S. and China internet analyst from Mizuho Securities.
Baidu posted yesterday a greater-than-expected gain in earnings soon after expense cuts bolstered its base line. Online promoting also carried out greater than envisioned regardless of hard financial situations this sort of as Covid limits and inflation.
Baidu inventory rose 2.61% Wednesday and is down 35.7% calendar year to day.
